Today is World Water Day: Water's not just for drinking
-- World Water Day, United Nations
Water system privatization. An article in the Guardian, "England's running out of water – and privatisation is to blame," criticizes rampant privatization of water systems in the UK, how more money is spent on dividends than repairing leaks. Meanwhile, desperate for money, the City of Providence is considering leasing their water system out, to get upfront monies to put towards pension funding ("Providence floats plan to shore up pensions by leasing waterworks, response is chilly," Providence Journal).
Flooding. Flooding in the Midwest is devastating communities ("Midwest flooding could be costly: In Nebraska, tab is $1.3 billion and rising with waters," USA Today) and is expected to spread further into the Midwest and the South ("River flooding to persist well into spring 2019 over central US," AccuWeather).
--Midwest Floods of 2019—The Latest Disaster to Learn From, Natural Resources Defense Council
Climate change ("Great Lakes region warming faster than rest of U.S.," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).
Sea level rise... Flooding in the Midwest, is only partially a problem of climate change. Sea level rise is a day-in, day-out issue for communities like Miami Beach, which experience flooding almost daily as a result of sea level rise ("Miami Battles Rising Seas," New York Times).
affects property values ("Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions in Property Value as Sea Levels Rise," Inside Climate News)
and can't be legislated away ("NC banned a study on sea-level rise. Could it mean more hurricane destruction?," Raleigh News & Observer).
There is that pesky issue of replacing degraded waterworks infrastructure, which is leading to significant increases in the cost of water.
-- Aging water infrastructure in the United States,| Deloitte Insights
The waste of bottled water ("12 facts that show why bottled water is one of the biggest scams of the century," BusinessInsider). A bottle of water for $1 costs 800x the cost of 16 ounces of water from the tap.
Do lakes and rivers have rights? Residents in Toledo vote in favor of giving Lake Erie "rights" ("Can a lake have rights? Toledo votes yes," Christian Science Monitor).
Plastic pollution in water sources ("Plastics pollution threatens Great Lakes, not just the oceans," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).
Labels: global warming and climate change, law and the legal process, utility infrastructure, water supply and use, watersheds
posted by Richard Layman @ 3:22 PM&Permanent Link
4 Comments:
Was just out in Souther California, where you can't help but think of water.
A couple things:
1. Water systems, like subways or transit, used to be ways to knit together a city. Not anymore. (See transit referendums).
2. You didn't get into the deloitte report, but they had a price of water chart which I didn't like so I found this one:
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/affordability-of-water-around-the-world/
Which basically shows that water is pretty affordable in most high income countries...the Deloitte chart was just going by dollars.
3. Going back to CA, restricting development B/C of water usage was basically 1980's NIMBY. And it worked!
I guess the way to think about it is that until the round of price increases related to the need to upgrade infrastructure both because of end of life of systems built 100+ years ago and because of new stormwater guidelines concerning discharges into rivers and lakes water was incredibly cheap.
e.g. I saw a headline for some city, maybe Detroit?, that the water bill will rise 12.2% each year over the next year years.
I remember back in the 1990s and early 2000s when my water bill was something like $35/quarter (but it was just me).
2. Your point about CA and "Nimbyism"... in Baltimore County, they figured that out in the late 1960s, that as long as they continued to extend water utility infrastructure, they would have sprawl. I don't know if they were the first to create an urban growth boundary, but certainly they were one of the first, in 1967.
Since that time the line has been adjusted, and sometimes they make exceptions for particular uses and extend water infrastructure, but otherwise, the rural section of the county doesn't have "city water" which prevents intense development there.
This article is locked but available through a library database:
https://www.omaha.com/news/plus/what-would-it-take-to-flood-omaha-officials-explore-the/article_14bf7933-9228-5754-aecd-006934a4d8e0.html
3/25/2019
cf what Tulsa did, discussed in a couple blog entries.
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